4 ms·

I wonder how many of these banks think they're using blockchain, and put out press releases stating that, because the engineers have lied to management in order

I wonder how many of these banks think they're using blockchain, and put out press releases stating that, because the engineers have lied to management in order to get projects underway. Matt Levine has been speculating on this a lot recently: banks traditionally have hugely underinvested in infrastructure upgrades. I imagine if you're in IT at a bank, it must be awfully tempting to go "blockchain! secret project!" to get management on board because the suits are all caught up in the hype. Then you can just immediately pivot to Apache Cassandra (which is strictly superior to blockchain in pretty much every proposed business use of blockchain I've ever seen) and no one's the wiser.

vladsanchez 9y ago
Would you please share references to your stated Cassandra superiority over Blockchain? Thanks.
- canoebuilder 9y ago
  Cassandra is real world proven tech with many actual, observable implementations "in the wild." What even is a "blockchain," not in the context of something like bitcoin? How does a blockchain even work within a single organization? However it may or may not work, the dynamics involved would seem to make it qualitatively different from something like a bitcoin blockchain. So you're asking for a comparison between something that does exist and something that doesn't. And in fact something that can never exist, if we are going to stick to the convention of treating names as more or less unique identifiers of a certain set of characteristics.
- code_sloth 9y ago
  Try querying a blockchain.
  - jameskegel 9y ago
    Block explorers work great. Is that what you mean?
tCfD 9y ago
This is exactly what is happening. "Blockchainism," a vague and shifting set of shared assumptions about voluntary custodial risk/reward sharing, vs "a blockchain", a particular encoding of a particular subset of these ideas into a white paper and corresponding client software, according to a particular framing of incentives motivating the people who created it, which may differ greatly from those who invest in it or speculate on it. Blockchain is on its way to becoming a hollowed-out incantation, like "green technology" or "democratic" or "brawndo"

vladsanchez 9y ago

Would you please share references to your stated Cassandra superiority over Blockchain? Thanks.

canoebuilder 9y ago
Cassandra is real world proven tech with many actual, observable implementations "in the wild." What even is a "blockchain," not in the context of something like bitcoin? How does a blockchain even work within a single organization? However it may or may not work, the dynamics involved would seem to make it qualitatively different from something like a bitcoin blockchain. So you're asking for a comparison between something that does exist and something that doesn't. And in fact something that can never exist, if we are going to stick to the convention of treating names as more or less unique identifiers of a certain set of characteristics.
code_sloth 9y ago
Try querying a blockchain.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  Block explorers work great. Is that what you mean?

tCfD 9y ago

This is exactly what is happening. "Blockchainism," a vague and shifting set of shared assumptions about voluntary custodial risk/reward sharing, vs "a blockchain", a particular encoding of a particular subset of these ideas into a white paper and corresponding client software, according to a particular framing of incentives motivating the people who created it, which may differ greatly from those who invest in it or speculate on it. Blockchain is on its way to becoming a hollowed-out incantation, like "green technology" or "democratic" or "brawndo"